Introduction
Clearcote is a de-Googled Chromium distribution with engine-level fingerprint controls — a drop-in for Playwright & Puppeteer. The open build is fully open source.
NewThe latest build is free for one browser with GitHub, a card check or a company Google account. Never charged.
Get it freeWorking with an AI agent?
Copy the entire Clearcote documentation as one prompt-ready block, then paste it into Claude, Codex, Cursor or any LLM so it has full project context instantly.
What it is
A stock browser quietly exposes a unique, trackable fingerprint — canvas, WebGL, audio, fonts, locale, hardware and more. Clearcote moves control of those signals into the engine itself, so a session presents one consistent, plausible identity instead of an accidentally hyper-unique one.
It is built on ungoogled-chromium (Google telemetry and background services removed) plus a stack of source patches. The open build has no magic binary: you can read every change, rebuild it yourself, and check that what you run matches what is published. The licensed build (the free key for one browser, Personal or Pro) adds patches that aren't published and gets new Chromium majors first, so it can't be rebuilt from public source.
Install it as an SDK — npm i clearcote, pip install clearcote or dotnet add package Clearcote — and it downloads and verifies the browser for you: the open build without a key, the latest licensed build with one. See Installation.
Principles
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open by default | The open build is 100% open source: every patch is human-readable, no proprietary blobs in the tree. |
| Engine-level, not script injection | Controls are compiled into the binary, not bolted on via brittle, self-revealing injected JavaScript. |
| Coherent identity | Signals are controlled together so they stay internally consistent and stable per site. |
| Reproducible & verifiable | Open build: pinned upstream revision, deterministic patch set, checksummed and GPG-signed release artifacts. Every build the SDK downloads is SHA-256-verified before it runs. |
| Responsible by design | Built for privacy, testing and lawful automation. You are responsible for how you use it. |
Who it's for
Developers, QA and automation engineers, privacy researchers, and the agents/LLMs that increasingly drive them. With Playwright, migration is meant to be a one-line import change; Puppeteer and other CDP clients attach to clearcote serve.
Clearcote is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any commercial product, and it ships no third-party proprietary code.
Next steps
Install the SDK (npm, pip or NuGet), or download and verify a build by hand.
Launch from the SDK, or attach Puppeteer and other CDP clients.
Copy-paste SDK, profile, proxy, canvas bridge, CI, and agent recipes.
Every identity switch, what it does, and example values.
Docker, the licensed build in containers, and a standing CDP endpoint with clearcote serve.
Prove an open-build release is exactly what was built — checksums + GPG.